The Drunken Monkey

why humans love getting high (Part I)

by Lorette C. Luzajic

Despite the major headway I’ve made these past few years in abolishing so many bad habits, the first thing I did after moving was head down the street to check out the neighbourhood pub.

I reveled in a kitchen much more spacious than in my previous flat, and I wasted no time making a ten-veggie super salad and a maple pecan pork roast. But the cheerful drunken faces laughing and toasting their pints behind the glass beckoned and the first night in my new home I headed over to join them. It was a scene straight out of the always-astute Simpsons: during a cook-off, Homer ingests a chile pepper so hot it bends his mind. And Chief Wiggum whines mournfully, “I want to hallucinate, too!”

What’s the point of avoiding bread if I’m throwing back the beer? Is there any point in cutting out candy and soda if I still drink loads of wine? Yeah, yeah, it’s great that I’ve moved from imbibing the good stuff every day to special occasions only (which inevitably happen about twice a week!) And that’s probably the reason I’m still fat.

I’m not the only one who finds nixing the mind-altering substances the hardest part of healthy living. And for the most part I have nixed them. But if the icons of fitness can’t always resist a drink, how can a weak-willed mortal like me?

Paleo purists who have achieved more success than I have may scoff, but the rest of you know exactly where I’m coming from. And our guru Loren Cordain knows no one will stick with a diet that has absolute no-nos, so we are encouraged to occasionally enjoy a glass of wine with dinner if we must. Still, in The Paleo Diet for Athletes, Dr. Cordain reminds us, “Obviously, alcohol was not part of any hunter-gatherer diet.”

Obviously? Certainly moderation is sound advice, but nonetheless the good doctor is wrong.

Say what? Humans have always been boozehounds. Always. Yes, since the Stone Age, since as far back as we can go and know. In addition to our more primitive ancestors, our first civilizations in Sumer and Egypt both considered alcohol a necessity for everyday living! The Egyptian god Osiris invented beer, and beer was offered to him. Just like we do, the people enjoyed a wide selection of beers and quite a few wines as well. Booze was so important that the dead were buried with it so that they wouldn’t have to teetotal in the next world.

Sumer’s goddess of beer and alcohol was Nankasi, who used honey and dates to sweeten her malt brew. (From here on, there was no shortage of wine deities, reaching from Rome to the remote pantheons of the world.) So it seems that civilization landed in all of its glory with a taste for the sauce already in tact. Winepresses, spirit cellars, and distilleries were magically present at the very dawn, and so perhaps the secrets of turning juice to gold was indeed imparted from the gods.

While civilization meant astonishing leaps forward in creativity, architecture, engineering, medicine, literature and more, it also meant grain and the beginning of degenerative disease.

Perhaps the price of living longer and recording more about ourselves for future generations to know was the deterioration of health. No need to sentimentalize the days of the cave man- death was early and brutal, often from exposure to the elements like cold and the jaws of wild animals. Learning what was safe to eat weeded a great many of us out of the gene pool- today we know the fast-acting poisons thanks to the mistakes of our earlier selves. But the plants of a lesser poison meant degenerative diseases, which anthropologists begin finding as soon as grain agriculture hits our imagination. And those diseases usually don’t accumulate through to death until after the age of reproduction, which means we repopulate before we die. So grains meant extended survival for humans, both in a lifespan and in a cosmic, “go forth and multiply” kind of way. The same poison that ruins our bones and teeth and pancreas slowly meant we could spend that slow death writing, inventing, philosophizing, enacting theatre. Now all grains have naturally evolved poisons- pesticides, actually, and carbohydrates. Humans gravitated instantly to grains- and every other available plant or berry- fermenting or distilling them into a much faster acting poison, one that would marvelously, wonderfully intoxicate it without killing us on that same occasion. Cheers!

The Irish often claim to be the world’s hardest, happiest drinkers. Archaeologists Declan Moore and Billy Quinn confirmed that long before Guinness opened its doors, Ireland had some 4500 breweries during the Bronze Age. There are thousands of fulacht fiadhs, or horseshoe shaped mounds, that mystified experts for centuries. Moore and Quinn date wrote in Archeology Ireland that these pits were in fact microbreweries dating back more than 3500 years, making the first generations in Irish history as beer-loving as all those cute bumper stickers boast.

So the Irish have been brewing and stewing for several thousand years longer than we previously believed. And those first amazing cuneiforms and hieroglyphics tell us that before we could record the story, we already loved boozing it up. Seems the Flintstones loved a bit of firewater just as much as we do.

(Stay tuned for some amazing stories from archeologists about the first party animals, and fascinating facts about our cousins who love to get down, too.)  

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 2:08 am and is filed under A Matter of Life or Myth, Alchohol and Paleo, Lorette. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.